We hear the clamor in the matter of the Patriot Act and other measures especially associated with retiring Attorney General Ashcroft. Just rubbing a hand lightly over American history reminds us that these questions arose in the past, notoriously with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Abraham Lincoln liked to have his own way when pressures were rife, and, of course, he suspended habeas corpus, to the dismay of members of his own Cabinet and the judge who gave us Dred Scott.

Somebody should do something about that situation? Well, somebody is doing something, not surprisingly, under the auspices of Harvard University. They have going there something called the Harvard Long-Term Legal Strategy Project. Its co-directors are the scholars Philip Heymann and Juliette Kayyem.

A few people have been sent drafts of the project’s tentative findings with, however, a warning that direct quotations are as yet forbidden – a warning so direly repeated on each of 11 pages that one wonders if a bolt of lightning would come down on any transgressor. But without direct quotation from the project’s summaries, we can usefully study the divisions in the questions being posed.

There are 10 recommendations in the report, which “seeks to find balance between competing concerns.” The thinking is done logically. Under “Coercive Interrogation,” for instance, one sees: “National security viewpoint,” which is elaborated, but in the forbidden language. There follows: “Democratic freedoms viewpoint” – which the imaginative reader can easily supply – and then “Recommendations.”

We move on to questions of Detentions; Military Commissions; Targeted Killing; Communications of U.S. Persons or Others within the United States Intercepted During the Targeting of Foreign Persons Abroad; Information Collection; Identification of Individuals and Collection of Information for Federal Files; Surveillance of Religious and Political Meetings; Distinctions Based on Group Membership (Profiling), and Oversight of Extraordinary Measures.

I take a single liberty and give the text of Information Collection, “National security viewpoint.” We read: “There is no constitutional right to privacy of information that an individual has freely furnished to such parties as credit card, electronic communications or car rental companies. That information can provide a trail of activities that, if identified, would reveal a likely terrorist plan. For example, the following pattern discoverable from such records would be highly suspicious: a recent arrival from Yemen accompanied by prompt rental of a crop duster airplane and purchase of equipment or material that would not be useful for crops but would be useful to spread anthrax. We should not forgo this opportunity to ‘connect the dots’ in time.”

Yes. Let’s not let that one get away.

Two points, in the welter of discussion about individual rights and corporate obligations, are worth stressing.

There is wide resistance, in the libertarian fold (in which I count myself), to expediting individual identification by means other than those we already have.

There are those who find this inexplicable. We are a nation of people who acquiesce in passport numbers (I was playfully given, years ago, No. 1234567.) You can’t easily mount a case against them without renouncing the very idea of passports. And, of course, there is the Social Security number. My liege William Safire some time back declared that he would not write out his Social Security number on random forms, which does not answer the question: Why not? What clerical sycophancy is involved in owning up to your name?

And then there is the grand question that stands athwart such efforts as Harvard’s to codify the separation of powers between the collectivity and the individual. It is: Everything ultimately depends on judgment. There can be (and there should be) rules against targeting chiefs of state. But there are imaginable times when the failure to squeeze the trigger at just that moment – say, when Colonel Amin is signaling the bomber pilot with the nuclear bomb headed for Jerusalem – would have worse consequences.

The moral artist tells you more than any committee of Harvard scholars, however distinguished. It is not true that rules are made to be broken. But it is true that breaking the rules can be lifesaving.